Voice Tips

Today, I want to share with you how word stress can add life to your voice when you speak.

Great speakers don’t just deliver information. They speak with feeling. They connect with their audience. And one of the most effective ways to do this is by using word stress.

Listen to any great speaker delivering a TED talk, pitch, or presentation and you will hear the way that they use word stress to bring a speech to life. It’s a storytelling skill that adds energy to every delivery.

But even in everyday speech, how you use word stress is important. Look at this sentence congratulating a colleague on her successful pitch.

    ‘That’s fantastic you must be really proud.’

Say it in two ways.

1. With no stress at all.
2. With stress on the words ‘fantastic’ and ‘really’.

How would your colleague feel if you said that sentence with no stress? Not great, I expect!

Word stress communicates your feelings and emotions to your listeners.  It helps them understand the full meaning of your message.

Good use of word stress is also important in other ways, especially when giving speeches, pitches and presentations.

Word Stress Checklist

Here are four tips for you for your next public speaking engagement. Use word stress to:

• Draw attention to your main topic – to make the structure of your delivery clear to the audience.

• Compare or contrast information you’re delivering – to help your audience follow your ideas when you speak.

• Focus the audience’s attention on your most important words – to make your audience remember the key points of your presentation.

• Add emotion to your delivery – to draw your audience into your message, a key technique used for storytelling.

Word stress is just one of the skills covered in my best-selling video course Unlocking The Power Of Your Voice – a complete voice transformation system that will give you powerful vocal techniques that you can start using immediately.

Find out more here: Unlocking The Power Of Your Voice

Watch the video below to learn about word stress.